Word: lasts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...disclosed that Sotheby's had lent Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond $27 million in 1987 to buy what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make it a standard policy to loan 50% against anything. We are not just lending against the object, but to an individual...
...through his regular dealer David McKee have jumped from $90,000 to $140,000 in the past six months, but Scullys are trading on the secondary market as high as $350,000, and Saatchi recently unloaded a block of nine of them on the Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd, who last month spent $70 million at three London galleries (Marlborough, Waddington and Bernard Jacobson) before moving on to the New York fall auctions. There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions," Scully says...
...should one suppose that these are dreaming connoisseurs who have just relinquished the ink block and the brush to dabble in the art of the namban, or round-eyed barbarian. Shigeki Kameyama, representing the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo, last week bought, among other things, Picasso's The Mirror at $26.4 million. The week before, he had also purchased De Kooning's Interchange at $20.68 million and a Brice Marden drawing at $500,000 at Sotheby's. Kameyama is known to other dealers as "Oddjob," after Goldfinger's hat-flinging chauffeur...
Aska International, the Tokyo art gallery that spent $25 million at the Dorrance sale, is controlled by Aichi Corp., a Tokyo firm that last September became one of the five largest shareholders of Christie's stock, with 6.4%. Aichi, in turn, is controlled by Yasumichi Morishita, a secretive businessman who got a one-year suspended sentence in Tokyo in 1986 for securities fraud. Morishita is reputedly worth a trillion yen ($7 billion), and may be planning a takeover of Christie's -- although it is unlikely that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission would approve...
...already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances of meaning, and has begun to function like computer-driven investment on Wall Street. Sotheby's and Christie's between them sold $204 million worth of contemporary art the week before last. Of this, American buying represented only a quarter; Europeans bought 34.9% and the Japanese a whopping...